"The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 1, the first prerelease for this version. Ubuntu 9.04 is codenamed Jaunty Jackalope and is scheduled for official release in April. The initial plans for Jaunty were published in September, prior to the release of Ubuntu 8.10. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth aims to boost the software experience and make the popular Linux distribution more competitive with Windows and Mac OS X on the desktop. Canonical intends to push the platform into the mainstream by putting its resources into upstream usability improvements. In addition to the ongoing long-term usability enhancement efforts, Canonical and the Ubuntu development community are focusing on several specific technical goals for 9.04, including improving performance and boot time and integrating web services more tightly with the desktop."

And with this practically worthless article, the hype machine begins again. The same tired merry-go-round as with every single Ubuntu release. Drop a stable (buggy) version and immediately jump to hyping the next big one. We'll spend the next few months speculating about proposed features, oohing and ahhing over screenshots that look identical to the preceding release, proposing new themes (that never, ever materialize) and wonder about myriad of other whiz bang features that will, as usual, fail to deliver in the end. When Jaunty finally appears, we'll post 10 million reviews that all say about the same thing and then we'll immediately move to whatever comes after "J". I don't know of any other distribution that does this but people seem to eat it up hook, line and sinker! Incredulous.